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Fitchburg City Council considers replacing parking meters with credit-card kiosks

By Alana Melanson, amelanson@sentinelandenterprise.com

Updated:
01/30/2013 06:33:46 AM EST

FITCHBURG -- Tired of digging for spare change to feed the meters when you want to park in and around the downtown?

The city is looking into replacing those coin-fed meters with ones that would take both coins and credit cards, thanks to a petition filed by Councilor Jeffrey Bean.

Bean said the idea came from a parking ticket he received on Main Street because he didn't have enough quarters to cover the amount of time he needed.

"If I'd had the ability to pay with a credit card, it wouldn't have been a problem, but I was limited to the change I had in my pocket," Bean said. "These days, people don't carry around as much change as they used to."

He sees the proposed investment as offering a convenience for folks needing to park in metered areas. Bean also believes it would increase revenue for the city, as people may be more apt to charge the maximum amount allowed at meters, $2 for two hours.

In Lowell, where parking meters have been slowly switched over to credit-card kiosks over the past five years, City Manager Bernie Lynch said the investment has created a positive return for the city.

Aside from the convenience they offer -- each parking space is assigned a specific number, meaning you can add more time to your space from any kiosk in the city -- the kiosks are bringing in much more revenue than the coin meters ever did, Lynch said, because they're not as easy to vandalize and regular audit reports show exactly how much money has gone into the machine through coins and cards.

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"We've found the kiosks pay for themselves very quickly," Lynch said. "Our revenue has gone up dramatically over the period of time that we've been using them."

Lowell learned the hard way, Lynch said, just how important those audit reports are, as they weren't run at all from 2009 through the fall of 2011, allowing Richard Neveu, an employee with the city's contractor, to allegedly steal more than $35,000 from the kiosks. Neveu is now being prosecuted on larceny charges, Lynch said, and the reports are now run on a daily to weekly basis.

On the enforcement side, parking attendants can use handheld devices to access with a click or two which spots are about to expire on any given street, Lynch said, so offenders are sure to be ticketed. The kiosks also allow the city to send out messages for events, such as winter parking bans, he said.

As there would be a great upfront cost to switching to a system similar to Lowell's, Fitchburg Mayor Lisa Wong said the city is unlikely to invest in new parking meters anytime soon. She was at a conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, and attended a meeting with industry experts and officials from other municipalities who have chosen a number of different options to address their metered parking.

Changing Fitchburg's meters would have to be part of a large-scale downtown-renewal plan, Wong said, for which money is currently being sought.

"If we're able to get grant funds to invest large sums of money into the downtown, then the parking meters would be a part of this plan, but I don't plan to allocate any city money toward the project at this time," she said. "It's not a wide-scale solution. We have other things we need to do."

In the meantime, Wong is looking into other ways to address parking in the downtown. She said a Montachusett Regional Planning Commission study shows there is plenty of parking in the area, but perception says otherwise.

Wong said better signage for currently available options could combat that perception, and she's also exploring opportunities for valet parking, creating loading zones, and making some areas temporarily free parking.

Quickly changing technology also leaves Wong hesitant to invest a great deal of money into new meters or kiosks, because phone applications for parking could also be available.

"We want to make sure that what we do works for Fitchburg," said. "We are getting ideas and best practices from other communities, but are doing our homework right now to see what best fits us."

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